


Small Things to Fix

by Merfilly



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, Star Wars: Rebels, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Originally Posted on Tumblr, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-16
Updated: 2019-11-16
Packaged: 2021-01-31 13:08:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21446704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merfilly/pseuds/Merfilly
Summary: Prompt from tumblr: instead of staying on Sulk Island, Luke gets kidnapped by older Ahsoka, back from finding Ezra and just not putting up with Skywalker Shit. They go on a Life Changing Field Trip.
Comments: 18
Kudos: 121





	Small Things to Fix

Luke felt like he was being dissected where he stood. The woman in the cloak, its hood peaked up over a pair of impressive horns, walked around him not once but twice, stopping midway to reverse direction the second time. She finally leaned on the staff she used, and looked him dead in the face. Blue eyes looking out of a face that was more orange than bronze, white lines highlighting the eyes and cheeks... he thought he'd seen the forehead markings once in Rebel correspondence.

"If you're what Skyguy might have become, had they all left him alone, I'm disappointed." She shook her head, and the hood fell back. "You think you have it bad, and you do. It's a real tragedy that all those students died. It's terrible that your primary student led the slaughter. I get it.

"There's this thing, though. I watched my best friends turn and try to kill me. I saw the Republic, bantha poodoo it was, fall. And I still got off my shebs and kept trying.

"You don't want to draw down trouble? Pfah. Stay here, and your myth will insure trouble just grows. Get over yourself."

"I did my part," Luke decided to say.

"So did I, kid. And you know what? It just keeps needing to be done. And those kids out there? Trying to do the right thing? Need mentors. So pull yourself together, Skyguy Junior, and get your gear. There's a galaxy that needs people willing and able to help them."

"If it just keeps falling back into the Dark, how the hell is doing anything helping?!" Luke snapped at this woman who couldn't possibly know anything about his trials... and yet the Force was taking her side. He could feel it shifting, licking its wounds, and finding hope again.

"If there are no Lights to follow, how can anyone find their way out of the Dark?" she countered, before turning and walking back toward the ship she had come in, an old Corellian hunk of junk that had more modifications than even the Falcon. "I'm pre-flighting. Takes me at least ten minutes, kid. You can either get with it, or sit here and wait for some headhunter to come along and end the myth."

He swore he wouldn't follow. He managed to stand still for an entire minute, before he snapped his hand out and summoned his own walking stick and a battered old Rebel pack to him from his home, to go follow her up on the ship.

* * *

"Why Skyguy?"

He'd gotten aboard, settled in on the co-pilot side, looked twice at the beat-up Clone War era astromech that had moved slowly out of his way. Looked a little like Artoo, but different colors. He thought she'd called him Arseven. He had then just sat there, questioning himself and everything about this while she got them lifted and up into space with just the astromech's assistance.

"It kind of stuck. I was a kid. Sass was my nature." She turned to look at him. "That robe looks worse than any I have ever seen on a Jedi. Like, worse than the one Cody salvaged from under tank treads for Master Obi-Wan."

"So you knew him too?"

Maybe that was a touch more skepticism than he should have used. It had been a very long time since he'd last heard Ben talk to him, though, and he'd never fully come to terms with the lies surrounding his original training.

The woman just sniffed a little. "Luke Skywalker, revered Jedi Master, Hero of the Rebellion many times over… and you have trouble meeting someone that ties to your past more than you ever knew? You didn't market myth-making, kid."

"I'm no kid."

"And I'm no Jedi," she countered. "Yet people still call it like they see it."

Luke could only frown at that; he felt every single year he'd lived and then some. The death of his students… had ripped pieces out of him, years off of his life!

"I survived the Jedi Purge, Luke. I had been a padawan, had been cast out of the Order, had been offered a place back only to turn my back and walk away from it. That doesn't mean I didn't feel the death of the man that Found me. That I didn't feel the death of the Order as a whole, with the Force crying all around me. That I didn't have holes punched through me because of the ones who had mentored me or I had mentored in turn being slaughtered by the very people we trusted most.

"I had to deal with learning they had all been stolen, subverted by the Sith at the center of the web, to destroy us from a man that had risked everything, and killed his own brothers, to get me out of that hell alive. So yes, I do have an inkling of what you're feeling."

"I didn't say anything," Luke protested.

"I'm Togruta; body language is louder than the Force even."

"I don't even know who you are," he answered that, weakly, as he found something in her eyes that made him look away. Was it pity? Or was it disappointment in the scion of his father?

"Ahsoka Tano, once called Snips by a Jedi Knight named Anakin Skywalker… and called Fulcrum by the leaders of the Rebel Alliance."

* * *

Fulcrum was a code word for an intel agent. It went with the symbol he'd remembered, the marks on her face. Before Anakin had stopped manifesting as a ghost, he'd had a couple of stories that started with 'if Snips could' and that had immediately trailed off.

Luke didn't know what to do with either piece of information. Fulcrum had been said around him, and in the mouths of the eldest members of the Alliance, it had felt like a name. Maybe Leia — 

— he jerked himself away from that line of thought immediately. How could he ever go near her again? She'd entrusted him to fix what was wrong with her son, and Luke had failed. He'd failed in such a way that he was, again, the last of the Jedi because all the others were killed that day.

He put himself to work on a secondary sensor panel in need o repair as he considered it all. Her words were stinging him… because of the truth in them? Probably. Which meant he should listen. Never mind how much he was past letting 'should' guide his steps. The academy he'd begun had been that next step on the path of 'should'.

"Funny how I never get around to working on the little things like that unless they get bigger," Ahsoka said in passing, noticing what he was working on. "Too much time dealing with the obvious, and not enough time catching the build up to it." She kept moving, and Luke truly listened to the words. Certainly they could have been just about the sensor panel. 

Somehow, he didn't think so.

* * *

"I'll make you a deal," Luke finally said, after they had supplied in one of the most run-down smuggler havens he had ever seen, and that was saying something. After all, he'd run with Han.

"I like deals. Sometimes they work out even." Ahsoka faced him from securing another crate of jerky for herself. 

"You don't drag me into the big picture, and I'll help you with the little problems."

She just smiled and he knew that was what she'd been aiming for. "Deal accepted, Luke. Now, go use the toiletries I bought and get that beard tamed, would ya?"

He reached up and stroked it. "What's wrong with the beard like it is?"

"You look like a space hobo. And if you really don't want to be noticed as Luke Skywalker, Jedi Extraordinary, pick out some of the other clothes too."

"Has anyone ever told you that you're bossy?" he asked, as some weight slipped away in the jibes she was throwing at him now.

"All the time." She went to secure another crate, intent on getting on their way now that he'd committed to the idea of their journey.

"I could say no."

"That never works well in the long run for the ones that call me bossy. Because I also nag. Had to; Skyguy was a stubborn bantha's rump."

Luke laughed, even as he wondered at just how irreverent toward his father this woman could be, as if Vader didn't even exist to wipe out happier memories of him.

Maybe she had something to teach him after all, with how she had survived life without losing joy.


End file.
